On-premise deployment of Supply Chain Network Design and Optimization software is extremely rare due to significant challenges.
Yet companies can’t deny that many of their other software solutions are often deployed under their private cloud like customer company managed AWS, Azure cloud space. Private cloud solutions do offer enhanced security, greater control over data, and the ability to customize the infrastructure to meet specific business needs. Moreover, on-prem deployment ensures the solution meets data privacy and regulatory compliance while the public-hosted SaaS solution often faces such challenges.
However, several issues make such implementation difficult. High initial costs, challenges with version upgrades, and the need for specialized IT expertise are common barriers. That’s why it is rarely seen in the market, making many companies not even consider if a private cloud solution actually exists.
However, to minimize your struggle and help you gain the benefits you deserve, Sophus X, a cloud-based supply chain platform by Sophus Technology Inc. comes forward, not only offering a public cloud-hosted solution but offering an on-prem deployment option as well!
Read this article to find out more about the benefits of using Sophus X, its implementation process, and the drawbacks of not choosing it in your initial days.
Benefits of Adopting On-prem SCN Design and Optimization Software
1. Data Security
The internal IT team doesn’t allow highly sensitive data to be uploaded to vendor-hosted public services.
For example, in the oil and gas industry, the bill of materials (BOM) information of your finished product (‘the recipe’),
In military/aerospace industries, supply parts, detailed specs, and pricing,
For Automotive OEMs, sourcing prices for different automotive parts from your suppliers.
Without implementing a private cloud, granting approval to use such sensitive data will not be possible. However, such data is important in the process of network design and optimization.
2. Huge Difference in Securing Better Cloud Resources
Compared to their customers, vendors can’t get a good deal from AWS/Azure for their cloud resources because these vendors are generally small to have strong bargaining power. Thus, vendors will have to charge expensively for cloud usage/cloud computing.
While Fortune 500 company customers like Unilever or APPLE, can secure a huge discount from AWS/Azure for using their cloud. Say that if the vendor would deploy on-prem for Apple private cloud hosted under Azure, it would be a lot cheaper and would have a much better machine/resources available. Hence, APPLE can get the same cloud performance with 20% of the price.
3. Superior Speed Because of Integration With Internal Systems
For customer users, usage of the software under the private cloud environment tends to be a lot faster because it is better integrated with the rest of the clients’ systems. The data transfer speed within the company’s firewall is much faster compared with cross-company system setups. Remember 80% of the time spent on a supply chain network and optimization effort is on data.
4. Customizations
A private cloud solution is easy to customize as it offers full control over the infrastructure.
Introducing Sophus X: A Cloud-Based Supply Chain Platform
Sophus X is a modern supply chain design and optimization platform. It’s 100% cloud-based, supports on-premise deployment, and executes the fastest mathematical algorithms. Whether you need help with annual budget planning, multi-echelon inventory planning, transportation routes planning, or end-to-end shelf-life simulation and optimization, Sophus helps you with all of it.
Moreover, the Sophus team specializes in creating a single integrated and optimized plan for your weekly/monthly S&OP process, GHG emission optimization, distribution network design, and omnichannel supply chain network design.
Key Features of Sophus X
Cloud-Based Access
Sophus X, being the first cloud-based platform in the industry offers easy and secure access to all the resources from anywhere around the world. You only need a stable internet connection. Furthermore, this platform offers you the flexibility to add or remove any resources as per your need, ensuring their efficient usage.
Automatic Data Processing
Leaving behind the traditional manual data management, Sophus X automatically refreshes, cleans, and prepares the data sets, saving you enough operational costs and cutting down the risks of human errors and data inaccuracy. Additionally, this automation streamlines the supply chain processes by executing them quickly and effortlessly.
Data Security Options
Sophus X, being a cloud-based platform, supports on-premise deployment as well to meet the data security requirements of its users. Thus, it allows you to decide whether you want to have a cloud-based or an on-premise platform for your supply chain planning and design needs. This flexibility in choosing the platform type aims at offering you a solution that best fits your platform expectations.
User-Friendly Interface
Following the users-first approach, Sophus X provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, helping you leverage this platform even without any technical expertise. It further ensures that each member of your team or the teams as a whole can interact and collaborate effectively.
Imagine having a platform where you can share and access data workflows with different members of your organization. It’ll eventually boost the decision-making process and add to better results.
Why No One Else Is Choosing a Private Cloud?
No one else is choosing private cloud because of a few challenges related to its deployment – these challenges include:
Long lead time for implementation on the private cloud: several months, sometimes years of effort for deployment,
Difficult to upgrade: because every customer will have their own private cloud instance therefore upgrading can take a great deal of time and effort for both the vendor and the customer.
Architecture and integration challenges: due to the architectural setup of many of the supply chain network design software it is very difficult for these software to integrate with other software systems.
Real-World Examples
Consider the example of Coupa/LLamasoft. They started with a desktop application and then provided an on-prem solution to the market called K2E. However, it was extremely hard to implement and maintain, and it could take a customer several months to implement, and once implemented it could take them several years before they can coordinate an upgrade which again would take several months. Eventually, Coupa/LLamasoft moved to the public cloud solution and its infrastructure setup no longer supports an on-prem deployment option, and it has completely abandoned the on-prem offering.
How Does Sophus X Come Up As a Solution?
Addressing the problems of private cloud deployment for supply chain network design and optimization software, Sophus X, being private cloud compatible from day one, performs the deployment within one single day and can perform the software upgrade within a couple of hours for each version update. efficiently performs the update every two to three months which takes less than 24 hours.
It’s making private cloud deployment 100x easier and faster than ever before in the Supply Chain Network Design and Optimization Industry.
Steps to Implementing Supply Chain Network Design and Optimization Software on a Private Cloud
1. Assessment and Planning
Start by assessing your need, do you have to use a private cloud solution for your supply chain network design and optimization:
– Because of data security reasons for highly sensitive data
– Because of corporate compliance requirement
If a private cloud solution is the infrastructure you would need, prepare a plan for the budget, timeline, and resources needed to maintain such a private cloud environment. It might be quite easy given today’s oversupply of cloud and computing resources.
2. Choosing the Right Technology and Vendors
The criteria that you must consider to select the best technology include scalability, ease of integration, user-friendliness, cost, customization, etc. Furthermore, most importantly, the ease of implementation and upgrade, because it will be where you will spend most effort and money on.
Being highly reputable, and only taking 1 day for implementation and a few hours per upgrade, Sophus X proves to be a key option during vendor selection.
3. Designing the Private Cloud Architecture
Designing a perfect private cloud architecture becomes easy when you are aware of its key components like hypervisors, VMs, containers, servers, resource allocation tools, storage systems, etc.
Along with this, you can implement a modular architecture and dynamic resource allocation, use scalable storage and server solutions, and ensure adequate bandwidth and low-latency connections for the scalability and future growth of your architecture.
4. Testing and Validation
Testing and validating the private cloud environment is crucial to ensure its optimal performance, security, and availability of the data, and reduce the downtime of the environment itself.
Infrastructure testing, installation and configuration testing, functional testing, integration testing, performance testing, security testing, UAT, and backup and disaster recovery are the key testing and validation processes. However, lots of these would be easily handled within your AWS/Azure/Google cloud environment.
Case Studies and Real-World Examples
Case Study 1: Manufacturing Supply Chain (Hisense)
Hisense, a company with a presence in 160 countries and territories, chose to work with Sophus to help with its supply chain network design and optimization. However, with its heightened data security requirement, all key data needed to stay within the Hisense firewall. Therefore, Sophus X was deployed under a Hisense-managed private cloud, being used by many supply chain modelers and decision-makers.
Case Study 2: Retail Supply Chain (JD)
JD, one of the world’s largest e-commerce and retail companies, faced scalability and data security issues with using a legacy desktop-based Supply Chain Network design and optimization software. Sophus X provided it with private cloud deployment under JD.com’s firewall and improved its scalability by 10X.
Conclusion
On-prem deployment of supply chain network design and optimization solutions comes with its share of challenges but also brings various benefits like enhanced security, greater control, compliance and regulatory adherence, reliability and performance, and customization.
Let the Sophus X team help you reap the same benefits without dealing with the deployment issues.
FAQs
Do I See an Improvement in Performance When Deploying Sophus X in Private Cloud?
This highly depends on the cloud resources the customer can secure. Sophus-hosted SaaS environment offers great performance but in some instances when customers can secure better cloud resources from AWS/Azure/Google, they can enjoy a greater performance.
Is Moving Your Supply Chain Network Design and Optimization Efforts to a Private Cloud Costly?
Not really, moving your Sophus supply chain network design and optimization efforts to the private cloud overall does cost slightly more than the public-hosted services, but it comes with long-term savings through enhanced efficiency, better system integration and time-saving, and better resource utilization.
Does Sophus X Help in Meeting Corporate Compliance Requirements?
Yes, Sophus X helps in meeting regulatory and compliance requirements when it comes to private cloud deployment. Because the Sophus X solution would be deployed under the customer-managed private cloud environment it means the customer would have the additional layer of protection and meet the internal compliance requirement.
